Bill Allombert <ballo...@debian.org> writes: > git log might be more useful in some situation and extremly inconvenient > in some others (to start with it require network access and cloning the > full project history).
A complete changelog is often an appreciable percentage of the size of that full project history. I'm dubious that, to avoid requiring users clone the full project history, we should ship the full project history in Debian packages. Debian does not need to provide every piece of possibly useful data provided by upstream; at some point, people really should go directly to upstream for the obscure and marginally useful trivia. I've stopped including VCS-level changelogs in any of my packages even if upstream ships them. The compressed changelog was sometimes over 80% of the size of the entire package, which was a complete waste. That said, I'm happy to leave this to the Debian package maintainer discretion in cases where it really is useful for some reason. I think the most valuable starting point would to be to standardize on /usr/share/doc/package/NEWS.gz for the human-readable summary and explicitly say to never install that as /usr/share/doc/package/changelog.gz. Then, we can define changelog.gz as always the detailed change-by-change upstream log (if such a thing exists), and clearly indicate that it's optional and maintainers should use their discretion in deciding whether it's useful to include, but should always include the human-readable release notes and change summary as NEWS. Unfortunately, there's no good way to do this transition without making a whole ton of packages buggy, since we're horribly inconsistent about how we handle this now. I think that's just something we should tackle, and make it very clear that this is a *minor* bug and people shouldn't harass maintainers about it, but we'd like to sort out this historic mess and switch to consistent usage of these two files. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
